The Globe and Mail
I don’t know what draws me to books about maritime disasters – my own experience at sea is mostly limited to a couple of unfruitful whale-watching tours – but I’m clearly not alone. The popularity of books such as Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea and David Grann’s The Wager has helped forge a new genre: the “sad boat” book.
After Julian Sancton wrote a bestseller in the genre, Madhouse at the End of the Earth, about a 19th-century Belgian Antarctic expedition gone awry, he was determined not to pen another sea story. But the tale of the San José – a legendary Spanish galleon sunk in deep waters off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia, in 1708 during a British attack – evidently proved too enticing. Hence his latest, Neptune’s Fortune.
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The San José carried eight tons of gold, and even more silver, earmarked to fund Spain’s European wars. That cargo set a record in its time and would be worth billions today. Though Sancton begins with the story of the ship’s sinking, Neptune’s Fortune reads like several tales in one, each gripping in its own right.
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Centuries later, we meet Roger Dooley, the maritime archaeologist who discovered the wreck of the San José. In Dooley, Sancton has unearthed his own treasure: a compelling protagonist with an unusual backstory. Though he found many wrecks over the years, the San José was Dooley’s Holy Grail. Years of painstaking research convinced him he knew its resting place and, thanks to the backing of a secretive British hedge-fund manager, in 2015 he was vindicated.
But the thrill of discovery proved fleeting. Dooley’s triumph was soon overshadowed by legal and diplomatic disputes among Colombia, Spain and private salvors – battles that, unlike the one that sank the San José, continue to this day.
Tilar J. Mazzeo’s The Sea Captain’s Wife may not technically be a sad boat book – the ship at its heart never wrecks – but it brims with danger, daring and even gold (this time on land, in California). It’s the 1850s: Transcontinental railways and the Panama Canal do not yet exist, so the only way to get provisions, building materials and mining equipment to a booming San Francisco from the East Coast is by sailing around the notoriously treacherous Cape Horn.
Though non-fiction, Mazzeo’s story reads like a novel – the title itself could belong to one – and what unfolds is nothing short of cinematic. In the summer of 1856, Joshua Patten sets out from Boston as captain of Neptune’s Car, one of the new “extreme” clipper ships that traded safety for speed (time being money). He’s headed for the West Coast and, as he has on a previous circumnavigation of the globe, brings along his 19-year-old wife, Mary Ann – a highly unusual move for the day.
As the ship nears Cape Horn, however, Joshua falls deathly ill. Since the first mate is illiterate, and the next in line is a mutinous scoundrel, Mary Ann takes command with the crew’s blessing, becoming the first female captain of a merchant clipper as she steers the ship through one of the fiercest storms in living memory. Oh, and she’s pregnant.
Mazzeo nicely offsets any girl-power melodrama with stylish and wonderfully informed prose to bring vividly to life the peril and grandeur of the Age of Sail’s dying days. (Based in Vancouver, she’s an experienced sailor herself.)
When it comes to our country’s history (and really, most things) Canadians typically default to understatement, even when that history is thrilling or tragic. A case in point is the May 29, 1914, sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence River, while the passenger ship was en route to Liverpool. Though Canada’s worst peacetime maritime disaster claimed more passenger lives than the Titanic sinking two years earlier, the event rings few bells today.
In Beneath Dark Waters, investigative journalist Eve Lazarus (another Vancouverite) seeks to rescue the tragedy from obscurity. In a fitting echo of her name, Lazarus’s book reads less like a disaster story – the sinking took just 14 minutes after the Empress collided with a Norwegian collier in thick fog – than a careful reconstruction of the lives of passengers and crew, some of who are rendered in moving mini-biographies (all are listed at the end).
The volume brims with fascinating images – so many that it feels almost like a scrapbook – including newspaper clippings, photos of the ship’s interior and letters (a minor frustration: the text of the letters is often near illegible). Among those disproportionately affected were Salvation Army members travelling from Vancouver to England for a congress; to this day, Salvationists remember the disaster as “Black Friday.”
Adding to the poignancy, many of the few survivors would soon head off to the First World War. Luck, however, followed the ship’s captain, Henry George Kendall. His next vessel, the Calgarian, arrived safely in Halifax the day after the 1917 explosion, and the next year he survived a torpedoing off the coast of Northern Ireland. Many of his crew were not so fortunate.
Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea made many best-of lists when it came out late last year, including The Globe and Mail’s. Of the four books covered here, it’s the slimmest, but its true tale of two married amateur sailors is still the most outlandish.
In 1972, Maurice and Maralyn Bailey abandoned their bland suburban existence to sail around the world. A year into their journey, they endured a disaster of biblical proportions off the coast of Ecuador, when a whale leaped from the sea and crashed down on their boat, destroying it.
Maurice, in a decision he would come to regret, had opted not to bring a radio transmitter, preferring to “preserve their freedom from outside interference.” Like a pair of oceanic Robinson Crusoes, they spent six months on a combination raft-dinghy, surviving on rainwater and sharks they grabbed by hand. They were unobserved – or ignored – by multiple passing cargo ships until a Korean fishing ship finally picked them up.
This incredible story of survival aside, what makes A Marriage at Sea an immediate sad-boat classic is Elmhirst’s downbeat, gently astonishing writing, especially when it comes to the shifting dynamics between Maurice and Maralyn. The voyage’s instigator, navigator, mechanic and captain, Maurice gradually loses physical and mental control after the disaster. Maralyn slowly takes charge, maintaining an irrational optimism even as her husband succumbs to despair and starvation. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect book than this one – in any genre.